Timeline: how did we get here?

1946/7 onwards

The Stoke Lodge estate was purchased by Bristol City Council in 1946/7. Stoke Lodge house was used from 1970 as an Adult Learning Centre. Parts of the grounds were retained as an arboretum, walled garden, car park etc. The remainder (approx 23 acres) has pitches on it and has been used for PE lessons by Fairfield School and from September 2000 by Cotham School, as well as for club sports and informal recreation.

2010

A briefing paper to BCC’s Cabinet set out a proposal to erect fencing around, and significantly develop, the playing field area. Following a public consultation, the Cabinet decided that Stoke Lodge would not be fenced off and that informal ‘as of right’ community use should continue.

2011

In March 2011 a local resident applied to have the playing fields registered as a Town or Village Green to protect informal use (this is TVG1). A couple of months later, negotiations started between BCC and Cotham School about the school’s lease of Stoke Lodge following its upcoming conversion to academy status. BCC inserted wording into the Department for Education model lease making Cotham’s rights as tenant ‘subject to all existing rights and use of the Property, including use by the community’. Linked to this, BCC agreed to indemnify the school for any costs/liability to do with trees and boundaries on the site and reduced the school’s maintenance obligation, reflecting the open amenity use of the land. Cotham became an academy on 1 September 2011.

2016

Following a public inquiry in June, the TVG1 inspector recommended that Stoke Lodge should not be registered as a TVG due to the existence on the site of mid-1980s Avon County Council signs about trespassing. In the first 5 years of the TVG1 application period, Avon owned the land so the inspector held that the signs were effective to prevent ‘as of right’ use in that period. In December, the PROWG committee disagreed with the Inspector’s recommendation, after discussion about the number and effectiveness of the signs. It decided to register the land as a TVG. The school challenged this decision by way of judicial review; BCC defended its decision to register the land in the High Court.

2018

In May, the High Court ruled that the PROWG decision was invalid, because the minutes of the December 2016 meeting did not properly explain why the committee disagreed with the Inspector’s decision.

Cotham School announced a plan to fence off the playing fields, saying that Ofsted required a fence for safeguarding reasons. In response to this, BCC officers informed Cotham that because the land was the curtilage of a listed building, a planning application would be required for its proposed fence.

Ofsted confirmed that it does not require detached playing fields to be fenced off on safeguarding grounds.

During summer 2018, Cotham School held meetings with planning officers (including Gary Collins, Head of Development Management) and subsequently with Mike Jackson, BCC’s former Chief Executive, and was allowed to ‘submit a case’ for reconsideration in relation to curtilage status. Much of the information provided by the school was subsequently shown to be incorrect, but on 21 September the school was told that officers had done a u-turn and the land was no longer considered to be the curtilage of a listed building, so no planning application was required for the fence.

However, following two mediation sessions hosted by Darren Jones MP in which school representatives had shown themselves wholly unwilling to compromise on their proposals (“It’s this fence or a bigger fence”), a second TVG application was lodged on 14 September 2018.

2019

Cotham School constructed a fence in the first quarter of 2019, under continuous observation and protest by residents. These protests ensured that the fenceline had to be altered in multiple areas and that post-holes had to be dug by hand rather than by digger, to protect the root zones of TPO trees all around the site. There was significant press coverage of these protests.

 In July 2019 a further TVG application was submitted for technical reasons (‘TVG3’) – this has been joined with TVG2 and the two applications are being treated as one.

2020

In August, with the agreement of all parties, the Commons Registration Authority appointed an Inspector to consider both TVG applications. 

2020 – 2023

The process has required many sets of written submissions from all parties.

More developments are expected soon.